Audio Poem: “Upon My Birthday”

I’ve spoken at length with you about years rolling by unhinged
like breathless wagons drawn by crazed stallions;
I’ve sat with you in the hushed cellars of our
toilsome peers devising machines of immortality;
I have calmly stepped with you through the doorways of hospitals and morgues,
scoffing at the gall of centuries to lay claim to my soul;
I have laid upon you, dear, halfnaked in dawn’s presence,
sucking sweetly through my nose the air you just breathed out,
heaving my breath in time to yours,
and even then, dear,
(even then!)
I did not feel as truly alive as I do now
upon my birthday,
this day with the earth in a precise arc in it’s trembling orbit
which somehow belongs to me,
this day swinging stubbornly around once a calendar year
so that I may live with true vigor and purpose these scant hours,
and be reminded there was a time
I was not even alive!